


The Art of the Compromise

by fandomaffected



Category: Ant-Man (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, hope van dyne is bi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 15:05:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19153459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandomaffected/pseuds/fandomaffected
Summary: Hope doesn't think she'll ever get it - a soulmark that will mark the spot where her soulmate first touched her. In fact, she doesn't think she'll ever find what others seem to have had for years.Then Scott Lang comes along.Soulmate AU where your soulmate touches you and a mark appears.





	The Art of the Compromise

**Author's Note:**

> English isn't my mother tongue, so don't chop my head off and I'll be really grateful thanks

Hope Van Dyne had grown up with parents who proudly displayed their soulmarks, an orange mark worn low on her mother’s arm and a matching one spread on her father’s palm. Her father had saved her mother from walking out in front of a speeding truck, and as her father used to say, her mother had saved him from a life of loneliness. 

Hope had grown up with two warm and loving parents, until her mother got lost in the quantum realm and her father became a shell of himself. The actual circumstances of her mother’s death would be unknown to her until much older, hidden by a thick weil of grief and guilt. What she had known was that her father wore gloves more often, never fiddled with his wedding ring while he was thinking anymore and sometimes she had been unsure he even washed his hands. Hard to see and harder to deal with, her father’s heartbreak eventually sent her to boarding school.

Hope grew up being terrified of love and the damage it had brought her family. She didn’t touch her first girlfriend until two months into their relationship, being scared sixteen year olds and knowing what touching might mean (or not mean). One moment their hands accidentally brushed against each other in the hallway, the next they were promising each other that the lack of a mark didn’t change what they felt for each other. People fell in love, got married and had children without being soulmates all the time.

Still, their relationship ended a week later.

After that, there was the guy in college. He was sweet and a little bit nerdy and just what Hope needed. When she discovered the soulmark on his hip she had felt her stomach drop to the earth’s core and further. Scared of getting hurt again and desperate for some kind of stable relationship, she had believed him when he had said his soulmate died a few years back. When said soulmate came back from a spiritual trip in asia, the guy was gone as quick as the lie he had spat.

Finally, she had crossed paths with Darren Cross. In the beginning, they had so much chemistry one of Hope’s closest coworkers had told her to “go for it”, seemingly unprompted. When Darren had brought her into a bathroom, told her he just wanted to try something and put their hands together, she had almost dared hope to see a bright green spreading on their palms. When their hands had stayed pale and uncoloured, he had shrugged, walked away and left Hope feeling, well, hopeless. Later, she had thanked the gods as Darren had lost his mind and humanity in front of her eyes.

And then, Scott Lang came along. Her first thought was that her father had finally lost it, bringing in a criminal, an unexperienced criminal, into their plans. Scott annoys her to no end, so as she tries to look for a soulmark on him, she excuses it as an old habit. Eventually she forces herself to stop thinking about it, doesn’t want to get attached because all this is going to end with her doing the job anyway.

Her father, as usual, has other plans.

She doesn’t want to admit the fact that Scott isn’t nearly as useless as she had thought he was, but she gladly shares her opinion that he isn’t nearly good enough. Hank asks her to give him time but they don’t have time and she can tell Darren is on edge, as if he knows they’re coming. Hope needs to let out her frustration and she finally gets the chance to as physical training rolls around, having planned out all the ways she will take Scott down and show her father she is the one who should do this. As it is, Hank seems just as excited to see Scott get his ass handed to him, observing them from the side of the room.

“I was in prison for three years, I know how to punch,” Scott says, cocky and smirking lightly. Hope doesn’t bother talking back, but challenges him.

“Show me.”

She holds up both her hands, Scott punches her right one softly and she lowers her hands again. Useless. Awful. Bad.

“Terrible,” she settles on. He can handle it.

Scott raises an eyebrow, “You wanna show me how to punch?” and she almost sighs.

She punches him in the face instead.

“That’s how you punch,” she says after Scott has fallen to the floor and can she see Hank smiling over there?

Hank takes a step toward them, “She has been looking forward to…” Hank says, trailing of and Hope looks at him. He seems to be staring at her hand so she follows his gaze, lifting her hand and then she almost thinks her legs will give out. Both she and Hank are out of the room before Scott has even noticed, yet along gotten up from the floor, going separate ways and leaving Scott to find out by himself.

“Hey! I’m not giving up yet!” She hears Scott call out before she hears a quiet “shit” and then she has locked herself in her room, trying to steady her breathing. With her back against the door she sinks to the floor and lifts her hand again, hoping against hope that maybe it’s just a bruise, maybe the light reflected on her hand in a weird way and Scott only cursed because he got a nosebleed. Instead she sees the deep purple that has spread across her palm in the shape of Scott’s knuckles. She thinks it might have been kinder if Scott had punched her in the face, expect then she’d have a purple mark on her face to deal with for the rest of her life. The rest of her life. A soulmark.

How many times as a young girl had she thought about this moment? About how she was going to throw herself into her soulmate’s arms? And how Hank was never ever supposed to be anywhere near her when it happened? Instead she finds out she is going to spend the rest of her life (is she?) with Scott and she doesn’t want to but she also doesn’t want to die alone and miserable and everything is wrong, so wrong.

She lets herself cry for a minute before she realises she needs to talk to Scott and act like an adult. She walks downstairs and into the training room.

Scott is already gone.

***

Hank doesn’t mention the mark, but suggests they take a day of. Hope doesn’t go to Pymtech, she calls in sick even though she never does and can’t seem to feel guilty about it. She spends the day in the woods, running up and down a path she used to walk with her parents half a lifetime ago. Eventually the hot day forces her to take a break and she sits under a tree in the field where they used to have picnics. Despite the heat she is wearing gloves, but when she sits down they remind her of her father and of her mother in some ways, so she pulls them off and throws them somewhere to her right, decides that the only thing she can do with the mark is deal with it.

It’s late when she returns home, but Hank seems to have abandoned his early bedtime. She hears him tinkering with something in the basement and for a moment she imagines going down there, putting her head on his shoulder and crying out her fears and anxieties as he soothes her like she used to as a child. Instead she sneaks up the stairs and goes to bed.

***

Scott comes over the next day because he has to, they have limited time to work with and they can’t afford to waste time. Their eyes meet only once, over the kitchen table while Scott is trying for the fiftieth time to get the ants to drop sugar in his now cold tea. She is frustrated and tired and she doesn’t know what to do with her feelings, doesn’t have anyone to talk to really, and Scott just doesn’t seem to be able to do it and she sighs before immediately regretting it. He looks up at her, and then down again before she can read his expression. She gets up, grabs her bags and heads into work.

Eventually, Scott starts getting better at controlling the suit but still can’t control himself around the ants, isn’t used to their sometimes unpredictable nature. She teaches him how to fight while only saying the bare minimum and as he gets better she can use more force and she enjoys that, doesn’t have to go for a run after their workouts to let out her frustration anymore.

Scott is still hopeless at controlling the ants though. It might the most important part of the mission and she wonders why her father can’t let her do it, he knows she can. Suddenly the unspoken words between the three of them and the feeling she has had lately of a rug being swept from under her feet becomes suffocating. She grabs the earpiece, almost covers the kitchen with ants trying to show Scott how it’s done and show her father she is capable.

Later, she is sitting in her car when the door opens and Scott enters. She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t say anything, just fiddles with the earpiece and probably makes the situation much more awkward than it needs to be.

“Should we talk?” Scott asks, he sounds anxious and can she really blame him?

Hope sighs, “I’m sorry I ran away that day. It was immature.”

“Well, for the record, I did the exact same thing,” He says and Hope looks up at him. sees him smiling gently and feels bad for not talking to him sooner. Why does he need to be so damn kind?

Scott continues, “I know it’s weird, and probably a little bit scary, but the mark didn’t go away in the shower, so I guess it’s real and now we have to deal with it,” Hope snorts but smiles.

“I guess I just always thought it was going to happen young, so I kind of gave it up after a while.”

“You’re still young, Hope.”

“Well, I mean, young-young. Like, early twenties-young.” They’re both quiet for a moment, not knowing what to say and maybe not needing to say anything either. What are you supposed to say when you’ve just met your soulmate? She used to have it all planned out as a young child, but now she can’t seem to recall a thing.

“I guess it could have been a worse colour,” She finally says and now it’s Scott’s turn to chuckle. He reaches over to her hand to grab it, slowly, as if giving her space if she wants to pull back. She doesn’t. He takes it and turns it so he can see her palm. She knows how the mark looks like by now, instead she watches him examining it. It has started to rain lightly and the faint sound of rain on the top of the car soothes her. The air is cool but Scott’s hand is warm and she finds herself enjoying the moment.

“I have to say, a soulmark in the shape of knuckles is pretty badass,” Scott says and looks up at her. She smiles and then grabs his hand to look at his knuckles.

“Having a soulmark on your knuckles is also kind of badass,” She says and means it.

The quiet settles again, but it’s a comfortable silence.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter when I called the cops on you”.

***

She spends her days working at Pymtech and her evenings going over the plan with Scott and Hank and making sure Luis, Dave and Kurt aren’t going to screw anything up. There’s no time for long walks where they talk things out or eating lunch together or even dating if that’s what they would have wanted, yet she and Scott manages to steal moments during their hectic days. Cassie has started doing gymnastics and Scott tells her about it on a late friday night after too much planning and too few breaks. They ask each other about the other’s day while making sandwiches for dinner, or pass the other a cup of coffee when the hour gets late. It’s small and it’s nowhere near enough to get to know each other on the level they will eventually get to, but it’s a start.

The days pass in a blur of late nights and early mornings and suddenly the mission is happening. Somehow they’re discovered and Hank gets shot but he makes it, Scott goes subatomic but he makes it, they all make it and Hope is grateful and relieved. Suddenly Scott is the proof her father has been looking for that it’s possible to exit the quantum realm and it’s possible her mother might be alive down there. The adrenaline that has been flowing through her is replaced with a new sense of hope and a slice of happiness, so she tells Scott she’ll walk him out after talking to Hank but snakes her arms around his waist and kisses him right outside the room instead. It’s soft and tender, it’s not perfect but it’s a promise that they might get there some day.

When Hank opens the door and sees them he just sighs and closes it again, and she and Scott chuckle like teenagers and somehow she knows they will make it work eventually.

**Author's Note:**

> So this felt rushed and kind of hard to read but I needed to get it out there because I have an unhealthy need for validation. Comment or hit me up at Fandomaffected on Tumblr and we'll talk about these two for days! Or just tell me your best fun fact in the comments


End file.
